With the arrival of Peak Oil, the curtain has closed on Act 1 of the drama Petroleum Man. What will happen in Act 2? Chekhov said, "If there's a gun on the wall at the beginning of the play, by the end it must go off." In the world's nuclear arsenal are many guns on the wall. If life copies art, will there be an Act 3 in which the players, having learned their lesson the hard way, live sustainably? To explore these and other questions... FTW's Act 2 Blog. Read, comment, take heart! Orkin

16 comments:

Thanks again, Mike, for writing another letter. I just love it when your keyboard trigger fingers get itchy...;)

USA Today finally wrote a front page article on how suburbs and residential development are going to change as a result of rising energy prices. This is obviously just the start, but at least they're acknowledging the beginning of the shift that's going to happen:

Big cities are unsustainable no matter what they do, and will shrink considerably. Once trucked delivery of food is reduced, there will be mass starvation in the big cities and also a mass exodus. It's sickening just to think about how many innocent people are going to starve because our shortsighted leaders built an unsustainable system.

Cops, paramedics, civilians gather intelligence -- Here we can see the development of the informant society, built on the model provided by countries such as North Korea. The idea is not merely to gather information, but to keep people in line with psychology. Since people don't know who's spying on them, they have to suspect virtually everyone. This deters people from talking with others to plan any kind of activity which might be considered "anti-government."

More worrisome: production fell 7.8%, the biggest decline in at least a decade.

Bloomberg: Production tumbled 7.8 percent after assets were seized in Venezuela, Nigerian workers went on strike and record prices triggered contract clauses that give oil-rich governments a bigger share of output.

CEO Rex Tillerson said that Exxon is spending $52 million a day looking for new fields. Crude prices may have fallen off their peak earlier this month, but if companies like Exxon continue to fail to increase production, it's likely that we'll be heading back to that peak (and beyond) very soon. Unless the global economy collapses.

That anthrax story made it into the mainstream media today. To me the strange thing is if he was the guy who did it, why did he only choose to send anthrax to the politicians who were against the Patriot Act? Was he that much in favor of the Act himself? Or was he being ordered to do it by someone else?

I haven't found anything about this in English-language sources yet, but today's paper has a front-page story about a serious shortage of bunker fuel for Japan's fishing fleet. A national fishing cooperative whose membership is tuna fishers -- who just happen to be staying in port now to "allow tuna stocks to recover" -- sells fuel to its members, but according to this report, internal documents reveal that the supply of bunker fuel from refiners has been down since January. In June the shortage of fuel available to the coop was so acute that it could cover only 32% of demand. Many fishers have depended on the spot market for cheap fuel, but that market has dried up, forcing them to seek fuel from fishing cooperatives. Japan's largest national fishing cooperative, the National Federation of Fisheries Cooperative Associations, finds itself in the same situation.

Meanwhile, refiners claim they are supplying the same amount of bunker fuel as last year.

Several years ago, when FTW was still publishing, I sent news reports about the first bankruptcies among Japanese deep-sea tuna operations due to fuel costs. The situation continues to deteriorate.

When North pole is devoid of ice, many companies will go to find deposits over there. That may defer peak oil for the moment. But it comes at the cost of lives because now who owns the North pole without any obligation to other countries?

It's interesting how the media is now all over this anthrax story. But where have they been these past 7 years? If someone sending anthrax to members of Congress isn't a story that should be followed-up on constantly until the people responsible are finally convicted, then what does constitute such a story? This is another example of our national media just being a joke whose purpose is to keep our attention on what serves the people who really control us.

Even though the media has also told us that Osama Bin Laden was responsible for 9/11, they don't feel it's important enough to put any pressure on anyone to find him.